As content providers continue to intimidate tech companies with a couch-potato conundrum, the latest innovation in the war to win your living room is not some new gadget from Apple or Netflix — it's a protocol that helps our screens talk to each other.

In an attempt to explain the popularity Android phones over Apple's "superior" iPhone, Gizmodo's Sam Biddle comes to the not-so-nuanced conclusion that "Android Is Popular Because It’s Cheap, Not Because It’s Good," an explanation that only explains part of the phenomenon.

Google beat Wall Street expectations with its fourth-quarter revenues of $14.42 billion, but the value of its ads continue to decline, an especially tricky problem with the company's new search competition from Facebook.

Apple will deliver its quarterly earnings report for the end of 2012 on Wednesday, and with it should come the end of all that talk about the iPhone's fade — or so say some analysts who continue to believe in Apple's reigning mobile domination.

So a guy spotted Google's founder wearing Google's Project Glass glasses, and the photo went viral. But the not-so-incognito ride still begs the question: What was he doing underground in robot glasses that only work with Internet? Here are some conspiracy theories, and answers.

The movement to kill the password is already underway, with the brains at Google experimenting with new authentication technologies for email, reports Wired's Robert McMillian. But what about beyond our Google lives?

Verizon reported a quarterly loss of $4.23 billion, or $1.48 per share, up from losses of $2.02 billion, or 71 cents per share a year earlier, in part because of losses and damages related to Hurricane Sandy.

Samsung will soon release a new phone for its popular Galaxy line-up, and the rumor-mongers can't stop talking about the specs and designs of their dreams — actually, they're starting to sound a lot like the Apple crowd.

Instagram released new numbers Thursday that show there's still devotion, but is there real growth to track since Facebook's $1 billion acquisition last year? Or a real drop-off since Instagram's sell-out move last month?

Facebook may have just released a major search product that many are saying "declares war" on Google, but Google CEO Larry Page doesn't sound all that worried about the new competition. Because who said Facebook and Google couldn't get along?

Responding to criticism that U.S. Attorney of Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz was too harsh in her prosecution of Aaron Swartz, late on Wednesday night, Ortiz issued a statement in which she defended her office's decisions as "appropriate" to the case and the belief his alleged actions merited jail time.

If it looked like the White House was taking a (fancy multimedia) page out of the New York Times's digital playbook with its interactive, "Snow Fall"-style new page on gun violence, well, get used to it — the web is proliferating with smooth, graphic-fueled pages, from long-form journalism and beyond.

If you were disappointed by Graph Search, take heart: Facebook just added a free phone-call option to its Messenger mobile app for U.S. users, a feature that seemed trapped in Canadian testing grounds ... but might just become Skype for the masses.

Despite all the laudatory praise for the idea of Facebook's new "third pillar," and despite nine years' worth of user data, early reviews indicate that Graph Search doesn't actually give great answers, and that the social network may have a data problem.

From a new set of opt-out options to just how much of your preferences are now searchable — and sellable — here's everything you need to know about protecting yourself from the many advances of the new product Mark Zuckerberg claims is "privacy aware."

Giving proof to the caution of experts who say that no suicide has a simple explanation or single cause, as more details have emerged, the roles of the players in the federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz, and their alleged contributions to his suicide, has become much more complex.

Expanding the Facebook experience to what he called its "third pillar," CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced that the social network was banking big on a friend-optimized new product it calls Graph Search.

Expectations are both extremely low and impossibly high under the "masterful" shroud of secrecy leading up to this afternoon's event, but everyone seems to have a relatively educated guess. Here's a reality check on the three big rumors.

The influential tech site watched its editorial integrity spiral out of control Monday, with staffers quitting and editors were left to explain themselves in the wake of explosive new charges over its annual CES awards — a scanda that goes to the top of its corporate umbrella, and could shake the entire ecosystem of online tech journalism.

Though mental health experts caution that there is rarely ever one lone reason for suicide, information is emerging about how legal troubles were mounting for Internet activist Aaron Swartz in the weeks before his suicide on Friday.

We have reached Peak "Phablet": This week the term for the popular (and quite awkward) devices was called "horrible," "stupid," and "worst word of the year" (to which we're about two weeks in). Even linguists agree.